THE fate of the region’s bees are hanging in the balance but a Birmingham academic has found an innovative way to investigate their plight. Mail Environment Correspondent Patrice John spoke to Dr Adam Bates about the rise of bee hotels.

THEY are the dominators of pollination but in the survival of fittest, British bees are faring badly.

Over the past two years, bee colonies populated by honeybees have suffered significant losses due to weather and the varroa mite.

Although Dr Adam Bates and his team are not studying honeybees, he does believe that the decline of any species will have a knock-on effect on other pollinators.

His work surrounds the movements of the red mason, blue mason and leaf cutter bees to find out how well they are mating and what environments are best suited to them.

This is why he’s placed bee hotels around the region to encourage mating and to find out which environments make the region’s bees thrive.

Dr Adam Bates says: “There are more than 200 species of bee in the UK, yet most people think about only the honeybee.

“What we are doing is looking at how the general layout impacts the habitats of bees.

“We will be exploring those kinds of theories which is the purpose of this study.”

Dr Bates admits he does not know exactly why the honeybee has been impacted so badly – but he is concerned for the species.

“Colony collapse is a real mystery and it’s impacting species around the world,” he says.

“One third of the food we eat relies on pollination and so if we lose honeybees it could really impact the food chain.

“Most plants in the UK are wind pollinated, but that is not so in the tropics as they rely on bee pollination.

“For a long time, honeybees have been strong and in a way they’ve been saving us but they’re now having a hard time, like lots of other bee varieties.

“Some believe the use of fertilisers, the removal of hedgerows and the use of pesticides are all impacting bee life.

“There aren’t a lot of places for bees to nest and there are also problems with them finding things to eat.

“The wild bees have all been declining for a while but because we previously had plenty of honeybees to do the work we have been ok.

“This is a big problem.”

Dr Bates’ project is designed to look at how bees nest and how well this happens within cities.

Contrary to popular belief, he says cities are a great place to find wildlife and in some cases the variety of bees in the city are better than those found in the countryside.

He says: “This project is all about how bees live in different parts of the city.

“Bees are living in cities a lot more because of the diversity they can find.

“The landscape is far more diverse in the city than in the countryside as if you look at something like an allotment or a garden, these are great places for species to live and grow.

“A garden has all kinds of flowers, all year round, and this does help to attract bees to the area, so different types of wildlife really are all around.

“By conducting this study we are really trying to find out what bees do in suburban and rural areas and we want to know if it’s their immediate habitat that is the most important to their mating? Or is it the surrounding area?

“The Government is pushing people to build on brownfield sites and it seems that things are becoming much more compact in cities, so environments are changing.

“These kinds of things could cause changes in the way bees behave and we want to study this.”

Dr Bates is using the study to look at whether ‘green corridors’ and areas of greenery between buildings, actually help bees to navigate their ways through cities.

At the moment, he’s not convinced.

“There has been lots of talk about green corridors, and the punctuating of urban spaces,” he says. “But we are hoping that the data collected from studying the bee hotels will give us better information on what works best for bees and whether it is more about managing sites and areas.

“Wildlife is all around us and you don’t have to go out into the countryside to find it.

“Nature reserves and even your back garden are great places for insects and wildlife to live.

“Wildlife is all around the city – you just have to look for it.”

Crops need diversity

Crops are mostly populated through bee and wind pollination.

The flowers of different species of plant come in a huge variety of shapes and sizes, and need a wide variety of different species of bee to pollinate them effectively.

So the future of flowering plants and people are dependent on the existence of a high biodiversity of bee species.

The West Midlands Buzz Project is exploring the factors influencing the nesting success of bees.

Adults build nests in a wide variety of situations, including tunnels in the ground, hollow plant stems, and empty snail shells, and they stock these nests with cakes of pollen and nectar on which they lay their eggs.

OPAL West Midlands is carrying out a number of research projects to try to understand how the environmental quality of green spaces and the layout of the urban landscape influence the biodiversity of the bee community.

The bee hotels that have been designed and constructed for the project are from CJ Wildlife and they’ve been created so researchers can open them up to look inside nest tubes to cells constructed by female bees.

Dr Bates is part of the OPAL team which also consists of Stefan Bodnar, Jon Sadler, Emma Rosenfeld and Jim Reynolds.